CSS: Cascading Style Sheets

What is CSS?

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation (that is, 'the look' and formatting) of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can also be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG, XUL and others.

CSS is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content from document presentation, including but not limited to elements such as the colors, fonts, and layout. This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, enable multiple pages to share formatting, and reduce clutter, complexity and repetition in the structural content.

Recommended Reading

CSS: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition, provides you with a comprehensive guide to CSS implementation, along with a thorough review of all aspects of CSS 2.1. Updated to cover Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft's vastly improved browser, this new edition includes content on positioning, lists and generated content, table layout, user interface, paged media, and more.

In this groundbreaking book, you'll discover how to implement highly original designs using markup and CSS. As someone who understands the creative possibilities, author and designer Andy Clarke offers visual designers a progressive approach to creating artistic, usable, and accessible sites using transcendent CSS.